A few sad things

Today is the 47th anniversary of Kristallnacht, a series of acts of terror that effectively kicked off the Holocaust. I got to Hillel an hour late by accident, and discovered that the board had invited a group of local Holocaust survivors. I ate with some friends and left early to avoid getting punched in the feels.

Yesterday I had the fight to end all fights with my ex, who is one of about three people who reads this blog. It was the fight we should have had when he dumped me, except neither of us had the balls to let each other go then. That much at least I've learned about yourself. He may stop reading after yesterday; but I started writing this before anyone read it, and I will probably keep writing when no one reads it.

So I've been reluctant to start reading The Fault in Our Stars; I don't need more sadness right now. On top of that, I have projects I've been neglecting in order to read these--reading for pleasure seems to take up more time than it used to, even when the book goes as fast as John's do. But it will happen this weekend.

And now a happy thing: Yesterday I had a bit of an epiphany. In my music class we're studying gamelan, a kind of Indonesian classical court music. And ever since I learned what Gamelan was, I've hated it; I've thought it sounded jangly and cacaphonous and alien. But yesterday in my recitation we actually learned to play gamelan. And I realized it's like meditating, but in a group. Each instrument has a melody that repeats over and over, and they all fit together and it's beautiful. At least from the inside. I don't know whether I can stand to listen to it from the outside yet.

Updates

He did show up. And Obama has, on the surface of things, won. And now it's bedtime.

The most exciting part of the election is the most boring

I had no reading time to speak of today, since Tuesdays are one of my busiest days (the other being Thursdays). And after all my classes I went to an election watch party in my dorm...at which I was so bored I couldn't even come up with things to say to the few people who talk to me at such things. Though I did invite a male neighbor over...but if he was going to show up, it would have been fifteen minutes ago.

Why is the most important part of the election--the voting and counting of votes--the boring part? And it's arguably the most exciting part too--this is the part where people actually get to do something. I don't get it. Though I am wondering whether, if Romney should put my healthcare in jeopardy by winning, I should convince my mom that we all need to move to Canada or England.

I'll probably go to bed before anything is decided, but in the meantime I'm watching November videos from Brotherhood 2.0, and wishing I was in Nerdfighterlike with someone.

-.- So it goes.

Dreams, headaches, and the fine art of being a sycophant

I think I've been too busy watching Vlogbrothers videos to notice that October has ended? Well, it has, all of a sudden, gotten cold and wet. Thank G-d the hurricane didn't come this far inland.

Monday night I had the best dream I've had in a while. It involved four different incarnations of the Doctor, Elijah Wood, and that's all I'm going to say for the sake of keeping this blog family-friendly. Not sure why Elijah Wood...maybe I'm just excited for The Hobbit.
But it's been sort of downhill from there. The last two nights I've had trouble sleeping (and some really weird dreams last night), and today I woke up with something that may now (at 3pm) be a full-fledged migraine. I rarely get headaches, but when I do they're bitches. Trying Ibuprofen and chamomile tea.

Wednesday morning was quite nice too...I dressed up as a Turing machine for my Mind and Machine class. The prof probably won't give me the free A he promised, but I'm pretty sure I made his day, especially because I was the only person who took his idea to heart. Wish I'd taken a picture...I used my scarf and some binder clips for the tape and symbols; the symbols I deleted were MnMs. That was a fun last-minute costume.

So, all I ended up doing was sucking up to the teacher. I am now officially a sycophant, and I can't say I care, not this late in the semester anyway. And in half an hour, I'm off to do some more brownnosing in my Comparative Poetry class. I'm one of those people who doesn't look like they're paying attention but can still answer all the questions correctly. That being said, I'm not a fan of the prof. She's the kind who insists she's right about everything, and says the same things over and over. Not to mention I really don't want to go to another class today...this morning I was so tired I was practically high off lack of sleep (just ask my linguistics classmates); the nap before Chinese didn't help--and then the nausea and headache showed up. But I can't miss today, since we're starting the Western half of the class (a lot less than half now...we've got what, five weeks left?).

So I shall soldier on reluctantly...and then go to bed very early.

Love your legs...or else!

So here I am, sitting on a hill in the shadow of what's going to be a freshman dorm after having a morning class canceled so I watched old Vlogbrothers videos all through lunch and that's why I'm talking like this. They tend to get stuck in my head.

Anyway, it's been an interesting week. On Tuesday I took two old pairs of jeans and cut the legs off them; right now I'm wearing the obscenely short ones, which friends say look good and which I can get away with wearing because it's 80 degrees out and will be nearly as warm tomorrow; after that, it'll get chilly again. But I've started thinking of these as my "love your legs...or else!" pants, because when wearing shorts that don't even reach mid-thigh (because I cut the legs where they've started fraying) you have to have high self-esteem or you're screwed. So, here I am, on a hill, learning to love my legs.

The other pair of cutoffs are knee-length (again, where the fraying started) and I don't think they're as flattering. But I'm using those four extra legs to make a tote bag that maybe my knitting needles won't punch through. Speaking of which, I'm knitting a Dalek dishtowel that I found on the Internet, and crocheting a Sierpinski Carpet blanket. Pictures when they're done.

Wednesday night I went to The Finer Things Club, where the board members seem to think I'm cooler than square watermelon. And I'm not quite sure whether they're being ironic, but it's nice to feel like you feel needed. I've joined the Dress Code Committee, because the current board isn't quite accommodating  enough of women. But it soon will be *evil laugh*

Which brings us to my adventures today.

Here are two leaves I caught out of the air on the way to my World Music test. The one on the left I fumbled three times and finally picked up off the ground; the other one I actually caught.

After the test I ran into an astronomy class using solar-filtered telescopes to look at the sun. My response: "ooh, there's spots!" It was awesome.

And now I have a quiz in Chinese. So I'll see you around. DFTBA.

Week 6: Mahjong, rain, Oxford, and the Enlightenment

It's kind of hard to get my head around that I'm going home in a little over two weeks. Except maybe I have been comprehending it subconsciously: I've been more homesick lately, and more likely to eat Western food--though having a cafe in the dorm helps with that, since in means I don't have to walk twenty minutes to get to the cafeterias on campus.
On the other hand, yesterday I had the most Chinese-y experience I've yet had here, and will probably ever have in this program: my tutor and I and a couple of my classmates spent most of the afternoon at a teahouse. The building was probably a hundred years old. The rituals of steeping and serving the tea (jasmine, by the way, and very good) may not have changed for centuries. The mahjong table was new--the electronic dice and built-in tile shuffler make it maybe thirty years old--but mahjong is mahjong, and all together it gave me a feeling I hadn't yet experienced. I've been to Tian'anmen, and to the Great Wall...but tea and mahjong are the real soul of China.
And the weather held for our excursion. There's been a lot of rain in Beijing lately. Last Saturday floods killed nearly forty people, and it's only supposed to rain more this weekend. Ah well, I guess it's a nice break from hot and humid. If it ever actually rains.
And speaking of last Saturday, that was the evening I finally watched Anonymous. It's a lovely movie; the only people I know of who don't like it are the ones who can't be buggered to put aside their pet theory about who wrote Shakespeare's plays. That the movie supports the Earl of Oxford theory only matters insofar as Edward deVere (said Earl) is a well-constructed and beautifully-acted character. (Not to mention attractive--he's played by Rhys Ifans, whom most people know from Notting Hill, and Jamie Campbell Bower, whom everyone will soon know from The Mortal Instruments.) The point of the story is that no matter who wrote Shakespeare's plays, they're still wonderful works of art, and powerful cultural icons, and a picture of the human condition at a particular point in history that still resonates with modern readers/viewers. All that good stuff.
And so it annoys me that people get bogged down in petty details, and stick to their biases to the point that they can no longer understand why anyone else sees the world differently. Which brings me to this week's episode of Crashcourse, in which John Green tells conflicting stories about the death of Captain Cook and asks whether, since transcending our own biases is so difficult, it's actually worth doing.
My answer: of course it is! As they keep quoting in Up the Down Staircase, "a man's reach should exceed his grasp, or what's a heaven for?" The fact that something is difficult makes it even more important that we try to do it. Colonizing the Americas was difficult; so were uniting the United States and landing a man on the moon; so too will be curing AIDS and sending manned missions to Mars. Humans do things because they're difficult.
And learning to see things from someone else's perspective shouldn't be all that difficult. To return to the Enlightenment, which I mentioned a couple of months ago and which John Green seems to enjoy talking about: the scientists of the late 18th and early 19th centuries believed it was possible for man to see the world from God's perspective. I'm prepared to argue that we've accomplished that. Now that we can see what a god sees, why do we refuse to see what other human beings see?

Lessons from Abroad: middle of week 4

Almost halfway already. That's a good feeling, oddly enough. The charm of being somewhere exotic and foreign didn't last long...Beida is already just a place to live in. Beyond that, here are some of the things I've learned this week:

• Food from Sichuan province might be hot, but Korean food is as spicy as it gets. One evening last week, I ate at a Korean restaurant on campus. The beef dish I got turned out to be right about at my limit for spicy things; I couldn't eat more than a bite or two at a time. And apparently they make it even hotter in Korea. So I have decided to set a new scale for measuring spiciness, measured in bibimbites (bbb); one bbb is how much my tongue and the roof of my mouth hurt after one bite of that dish (which was not in fact bibimbap, but I needed a cool name). The next day, I ate Sichuan-style liver (it may even have been beef), which was about 3 bbb--that is, it took three bites for my mouth to hurt as much as I remember one bite of the Korean beef taking.
• I'm a lot less picky about food than I thought I would be. I'm still avoiding pork and shellfish where I can, but where I can't I'll eat pork. Various kinds of tofu are also getting less weird for me...and there's some spicy things I find I can eat, because I paid for them and don't want to waste money.
• Thought 1 from homestay: Elderly Chinese people are a lot like elderly Jewish people. I had dinner this evening with my homestay family, an older couple, and the wife was very bubbe-like, urging me to keep eating, making most of the conversation, and occasionally repeating something I'd said to the husband, who wasn't really paying attention. It felt familiar, and was therefore nice. The food was good too--kind of a mild beef chili-soup-thing over beef noodles.
• Thought 2 from homestay: Personal comfort doesn't really seem to be a factor in ordinary Chinese people's lives. My evidence: the beds. Living in the dorm, I thought my bed was uncomfortably hard. Then I moved into the homestay, and discovered how much less comfortable beds could be. The dorm beds now seem nice and soft, and I imagine my bed at home will be heaven. If it's not already too soft.
• The Chinese seem to have a mostly positive stereotype of Jews: they think we're especially smart, and I hope I've met my hosts' expectations in this regard.

Before I go, here's a picture of a Lucky Bird. They're as common on the Beida campus as feral cats, or (for comparison) slightly less common than pigeons in Pittsburgh. And they're prettier than pigeons.

Lessons from Abroad

I've been in China for two weeks already, for an eight-week intensive language-learning program at Peking University, and I'm already getting a decent picture of how urban Chinese society works. I've been so busy lately I almost didn't write this, but here are some lessons I've already learned:

• Americans are neat freaks. In China, there's no assiduous cleaning of restaurant tables and bathroom stalls; certain places will always smell terrible to the average American nose; and if you hand-wash your clothes, it's hard to get the stains out. This is okay. Except that I plan on buying more shirts when I come home to the American standard of cleanliness, because I'm never going to get those beef broth stains out of my light-colored shirts. (Noodles in beef broth behave like spaghetti in tomato sauce; and you'll always be wearing a light-colored shirt when you eat either.)
• Food is fun, when it doesn't get all over you. For one thing, Chinese politeness standards are not American; it's perfectly acceptable to slurp noodles, which I can't seem to do neatly, hence the stains. Still usually fun. For another, chopsticks are awesome things. Third, there's so many exciting dishes, from baozi (the big round dumplings) to chicken soup with the meat still on the bones, to Peking duck in little rice pancakes. (That was an awesome day.)
• You don't need to understand everything that's being said to you to get what's going on. However, when someone is talking directly to you, you'll always wish you could remember all your vocabulary.
• Sunny days are to be appreciated...of course, as with everything else, there are exceptions. We've been lucky enough to have four blue-sky days in a row, but that makes it hotter. Best way to get around that: carry an umbrella. They were invented for the sun, you know.
• Get as much sleep as you can; the teachers will run you ragged.

And with that, I'm gradually off to bed.

Eat Drink Man Woman: thoughts after the first hour

I've started watching Chinese movies to brush up on my listening skills before I go study abroad in Beijing. Right now, I'm working my way through Eat Drink Man Woman, a '90s Taiwanese classic about a retired chef and his three daughters. I'm about halfway through, and it's already left me with some frustrating impressions.

First of all, the characters have started to bug me: why don't they communicate, instead of just talking? The second daughter, an airline executive, is about to be promoted and sent to Amsterdam. That evening, she goes to her somewhat-boyfriend's apartment, makes him a huge fancy dinner, and reminisces about learning to cook and how her father was so much nicer of a person when she was younger. The boyfriend tries to cheer her up by being silly, but she gets irritable. At that point, in the second daughter's place, I would have told him what was behind all this emotion. (Edit: She did tell him at some point, and then she tries to tell her family and gets cut off, and doesn't try again.)
The father doesn't communicate either. When the second daughter sees him in the hospital, in the cardio department, she's shocked and scared. He didn't tell anyone he was going in for a checkup, and she thinks something is seriously wrong.

My second impression is that the movie is about a conflict between tradition and modernity. The second daughter, especially, is torn between career advancement and making her own way on the one hand, and filial piety and keeping her father happy on the other. Then in the next scene, she complains to Lao Wen (a family friend) about how her father "exiled" her from the kitchen, where she could have become a master chef, and forced her to continue studying. Lao Wen tells her that her father did the right thing, to which she responds "Why did no one ever ask what I wanted?"
Simple answer: because that's not how things work. Even in 1990s Taiwan, the traditions of the mainland prevail at home. She should be glad women are allowed to be airline executives, and get the promotion she's likely to get! But again, the modern role her father wanted for her twenty years ago is conflicting with the traditional role he wants/needs now, and she's afraid of what he'll think of her moving away.

The pressures of modernity are also felt by the other two daughters, whose stories I've seen before in separate movies: the first daughter is a teacher receiving anonymous notes as a prank by her students, and the third is caught up in negotiations between her friend and the friend's ex, in a typical teenage romantic comedy of communication errors. However, they don't seem to be feeling the pressures of tradition as much, so the second daughter is the one with the most interesting story, and the one of the three that I'm most frustrated with.

The third impression I'm getting of this movie is not, in fact, a frustrating one: I'm understanding a lot more than I thought I would. They speak fast, and I rely heavily on the subtitles, but there are places I can tell what they're saying, and that it differs from the subtitles. Like they don't use the formal speech patterns I've been learning (though again, this is Taiwan, not the mainland), and like the scenes where the little girl (another family friend) calls the chef "Mr. Chu" in the subtitles. She's really saying "Zhu yeye" (Grandpa Chu). And that's linguistically neat, and she's cute, and her interactions with Grandpa Chu are a fun spot in a movie that has so far otherwise been quite emotionally heavy.

Perhaps I'll post more of my impressions after I finish the movie.

Miracles: One size doesn't fit all

Last night I went to Hillel for Shabbat services for the first time in more than a month. I'm kind of embarrassed to say so, but I think it's important, because I wouldn't have made the mental leap I did if I'd seen the text every Friday for the last full semester.
In the middle of the service there's a section called the Amidah, which you say while standing, and often silently. Yesterday, while reading it to myself, I noticed something for the first time that struck me. At the bottom of one page of the siddur (prayer book, for all you goyim reading this) is a short prayer, about a line and a half, expressing our (cultural and theoretical--I'll get into that later) longing for G-d to "return to Zion." By this, I'm pretty sure it means the coming of the Messiah. Then I turned the page and started reading the much longer prayer thanking G-d for little everyday miracles.
Wait, what?
The coming of the Messiah is about the biggest possible miracle ever, and it gets a line and a half. The prayer for small miracles is seven lines in the English translation. Now. Nothing in Scripture is there by accident; it's all been put there by the writers (in this case, the medieval rabbis who compiled the service) for a reason. So what's the reason?

As far as I can tell, the order was intended to remind us to focus on the small things. Then as now, people tend to dwell on the possibility of something big happening: a natural disaster, a war victory, divine judgment. That second prayer tells us that little everyday miracles--events as common as sunrises and family movie nights--are just as miraculous as the coming of the Messiah.
It baffles me that I never hear this second prayer recited in Reform versions of the service. Not hearing the first one makes sense, since the Reform and other more secular movements in Judaism tend not to believe that the Messiah will come in a blaze of glory and make everything better for the faithful. But shouldn't disbelieving the greatest possible miracle make all the smaller ones that much more important?